[WIP] Castenet Regional Map - My First Map on CG

[Montcalm]

I've been lurking on CG for years, but here is finally my first post. This is the base map of Castenet, my D&D campaign setting.

I'm a big fan of taking real elevation maps of places that I find fascinating and then stitching them together in my own way. For heightmaps I use Tangram Heightmapper, which I find amazing. In this map, you can find the Ethiopian Highlands, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, the Carpathians and the Manicouagan Reservoir. I put it all together in photoshop and use masks to make the transitions as seamless as possible.

At first I used a gradient for the coloring, but I preferred the result I got from using thresholds and different colors. The coloring will probably be revised for the final version.

Finally, I created a relief from the topographic map with Render-Lighting Effects and color burn it over the map.

This isn't the first iteration of this map, and a ton of learning was done in the process. But I'm now trying to make an "official" version of it, and by posting my journey here, I'm obliging myself to complete the project. I have already started work on rivers and labels. I have a good idea of what I want as an end result, I can explain it in a subsequent post.

Your comments are appreciated!

[wminish]

Hi Montcalm, welcome to the guild. This is looking good so far, you've done a really good job of blending in the join lines. Even knowing roughly where they should be I'm having a hard time spotting then.

[Kellerica]

The elevation and the relief effect is excellent! Really nice work on this so far. The colours are a bit too saturated for my personal taste, but other than that it's looking really good. Looking forward to seeing this develop.

Welcome to the Guild!

[Redrobes]

Yes this is very good work. The height maps are indeed excellent. I must have a look at the app you mentioned. I like to use real world height maps too from similar locations. I made some seamless height maps of mountainous areas and then roughly get the height of the map areas desired then multiply the seamless tile by the rough height and it gives the mountains in the places you want it. Its a good way to do it if your tool allows the multiplication of height maps with 16+ bit precision.

[Montcalm]

Hi Montcalm, welcome to the guild. This is looking good so far, you've done a really good job of blending in the join lines. Even knowing roughly where they should be I'm having a hard time spotting then.

Thanks! Instead of wanting to keep the original heightmap as faithful as possible, I leave a good overlap between two layers and I use a mask and a soft brush to make a better transition.

The elevation and the relief effect is excellent! Really nice work on this so far. The colours are a bit too saturated for my personal taste, but other than that it's looking really good. Looking forward to seeing this develop.

I'm not sure of the colors either. But these are good colors to work with since you can see the relief well. The adjustments to the coloring will be made at the end, especially since I constantly change my mind. I still desaturated the image a bit for now.

Yes this is very good work. The height maps are indeed excellent. I must have a look at the app you mentioned. I like to use real world height maps too from similar locations. I made some seamless height maps of mountainous areas and then roughly get the height of the map areas desired then multiply the seamless tile by the rough height and it gives the mountains in the places you want it. Its a good way to do it if your tool allows the multiplication of height maps with 16+ bit precision.

Here is the link. You zoom-in on the heightmap you want then export. The auto-exposure is great since you get better contrast depending on the min-max height on the screen.
I'm not sure I understand your method. Would you care to provide an exemple, I'd be interested!

I started working on labels, lakes and rivers. Still lot of work to do.

For the rivers, I'm not sure which way to go. Below are three methods I tried. Left: I played with the heightmap to get where the lowest ground would be. Middle: I hand-painted the rivers with a soft 3px brush. Right: I hand-painted the rivers with a hard 2px pencil. Your suggestions would be appreciated in this regard!

Rivers.jpg

Here is where I am at the moment:

New Base Assemble v.2 (reduced).jpg

[Chashio]

Very nice map!

[Peter Toth]

Wow, your results are spectacular. If you hadn't mentioned, I'd never have guessed that this was your first contribution. So congratulations and welcome to the Guild! Keep on mapping!

Peter

[Naima]

Very nice job on the continental map , Welcome to the guild.

[Edward Tait]

Really like the map and thanks for the link to the heightmap. I also stitched together my map with places that I have a connection too. As for the rivers, I ended up drawing them with a brush/pencil at first then went back to my sea and land layer and added them in. Once that was done I updated the layers and was able to get a more consistent water color to work with. Look forward to seeing your final version (and if like me a final version of the first draft of many drafts LOL) Good luck.

[Redrobes]

I'm not sure I understand your method. Would you care to provide an exemple, I'd be interested!

Well it is going to be a little hard to describe. But if we work in greyscale bitmaps then to make a seamless texture you can use the tutorial thing I wrote a while back:
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ead.php?t=1373

Now if you do that only with 16 bit height map values instead of bitmaps then you can get the same result.

So I download a load of real height maps and place them together as best as possible. Then blend them into one large one where there is no obviously large discontinuities at the edges so that you could butt them together and it wont look all that bad. You can fade out at the edges and have a different tile if you like is another way to do it.

So that tile makes your high frequency rock texture in height map. You then manually use an airbrush to generate a greyscale bitmap of where you want your mountains and set up the heights manually but very roughly. If you want a long mountain range you can spray on a line of white and fade it all down so its a blurry greyscale height map of the landscape but with no texture to it.

Then with a suitable height map tool (and thats the issue usually) you multiply them together and then where you have high blobby bits you get high rocky textured zones and where it was low (or dark) blobby areas you don't get very much of the texture coming through. When you look at the result you will have mountains that match the form of where you placed them. The detail of the mountains look real because it came from real height map relief from earth data such as Shuttle SRTM or similar.